


Empty Spaces

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 06:41:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18751069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "The day is saved, Jack is getting along great with all the other formerhuman/halfhuman/humanoid guradians and it’s all hunky dory.Except now Bunny’s alone with his thoughts, and remembering the feeling of losing believers triggers a PTSD-episode like reminder of the way having all the other Pookas on the planet slaughtered/die felt.He does not cope well and withdraws subtly away from the other guardians, and hides himself from MiM.Someone (Jack of Pitch, maybe? Understanding loss, to an extent. But whatever other people want is fine) notices and tries to draw him out of it. Or at least deal with it properly.I find it rather ironic that a Pooka in a hopeless situation is the Guardian of Hope. Someone has a dark sense of humor."Bunny goes back to the Warren after the events of the movie, and it hasn’t healed itself. Things only start to get a little better after Bunny’s run himself to exhaustion.





	Empty Spaces

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 8/6/2015.

After the battle, after the victory, after the oath, Bunny returns to the Warren. He returns in high spirits, full of belief, full of power, the sense of the children who saw him and cheered him on that Easter night buoying him up—and then he leaves his tunnel. The Warren is still green, of course, nothing could take away the green of the Warren, at least nothing that wouldn’t have to get rid of him, first, but…  
  
Oh. Oh, the Warren has not healed itself after Pitch’s attack. The turf is gouged with hoofprints and the long score marks left where the nightmares had landed, paint flowers lie uprooted on the ground and float sadly down the color rivers that have been muddied with black sand, and the more he looks the more he sees that the black sand is everywhere, muddling with the rich brown soil, choking the trees in drifts and abrading the moss. Everywhere, too, are eggshells, their beautiful patterns fragmented, never to be seen by those for whom they were intended. Never having reached the surface, some of their legs remain, and the magic that’s left means some of them still kick feebly.  
  
Bunny doesn’t want to step on any of the eggshells, to break any of them further, but it’s impossible to move in the Warren without doing so. They don’t hurt his feet, or at least not enough to notice in the pain of the rest of the devastation.  
  
The Warren is wounded, terribly, terribly wounded. The breezes within it have grown still, the birds are silent, the butterflies don’t fly, and it feels empty, truly empty, of anything other than him and the destruction that Pitch left behind. Empty.  
  
He’s seen this before, he’s been in empty places before, he’s—  
  
He runs through the Warren, he runs, and he runs, and he doesn’t have to stop because the Warren still shapes itself for him, and he has no thought in his mind but running.  
  
Later, rather than sooner, he collapses from exhaustion in the shadow of one of the great stone eggs, far from his own bed. His sore legs twitch, but he wants to run still, to run until he finds somewhere that isn’t empty—surely there must be somewhere that isn’t empty.  
  
Yet he can’t keep himself from sleep. His fitful doze soon turns into a deep slumber, though he doesn’t want it to, he doesn’t want the dreams that he knows will come—but then, they don’t come. His dreams are not the dreams of other empty places, as he feared, but something he’s never seen before. He floats in a dark sky, and the bright gold stars all around him feel much closer than stars usually do. They seem familiar, they seem like they have names. This dark sky is not a void at all, but a place of beautiful, silent connection. Even as he looks, though, he feels in his heart that this scene is gone now, gone forever. It strikes him with a pang that is not his own, and he realizes this scene, this view, this memory, is Sandy’s.  
  
Sandy, oh, Sandy. He had lost just as much as Bunny had, long ago. In the gold of those stars was understanding. Sandy could have given him memories of his home before it was empty, but that wouldn’t help right now. In this, though, in these stars…he knew they were gone, but they looked almost like the night sky full of dreams. The losses they had suffered hurt—how could they not? But they did not mean that nothing beautiful could exist again.  
  
The Warren would re-grow. Sandy would come, and help clear away the black sand, and the Warren would not be empty anymore.  
  
The stars shift around him, blooming into huge flowers. Very good, he seems to hear someone saying, but first, rest more, much more.  
  
Bunny drifts over and through strange golden landscapes that now only exist in dreams, and he does not struggle to wake, safe in the comfort of Sandy, who does not know better, but knows just as well.


End file.
